[nurettin]

Delphi and Lazarus are a continuation of the beloved gui-first idiom where you are greeted by an IDE capable of running code at design-time. That means you can add an sql connection component, create a query, connect it to a data source, connect the data source to a grid and fill it right there while designing your form to see how the result will look like when you run it.

The second reason to use it is: it builds for many targets and runs without garbage collection.

Lazarus needs to recompile and restart itself in order to use packages, but other than that, it's pretty stable and fast. VSCode can be used to edit Pascal code, but it is pretty irrelevant.

[regularfry]

It's funny how that sort of immediacy is what people like about lisps, but to my knowledge there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

[Barrin92]

> there is nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world.

The key phrase there is 'open source' I believe, because tools like Lazarus come out of a pretty distinct Borland / Windows culture of making bespoke usually paid graphical development tools. Lisps have a lot of their roots in the academic and Unix culture with a lot of folks seemingly allergic to GUIs to this day. There's an interesting interview with Carmack from a year or two ago talking about this.

[trealira]

It seems like there used to be more of a paid, proprietary, GUI using culture for Lisp, too, in the form of Lisp machines and products like that. They used to not only advertise their programming environment, but also advertise Lisp machines for things like 3D animation and editing office documents.

[e12e]

> nothing like the RAD interface Lazarus and Delphi have in the open source lisp world

Maybe in Racket if you squint a bit?

https://github.com/Metaxal/MrEd-Designer/wiki

[deathtrader666]

Would be cool to have a Lisp backend with a Pascal GUI